Voices of the Gulf

On April 12, 2013, Bridge the Gulf and the Gulf Coast Fund convened a roundtable discussion with people working to bring attention to a public health crisis they have seen unfold since the BP disaster. Participants included a mother from a coastal Louisiana town overcome by chronic illness, a doctor, two scientists and a lawyer. [...Read more]

Three years since the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico set off the worst oil disaster in United States history, BP Chief Bob Dudley says everything is fine in the Gulf of Mexico. [...Read more]

Amber Bartlett had just finished reading a book in her Mayflower, AR, home when she got a call from her teenage daughter that she will never forget; police had stopped her from entering their subdivision because of a dangerous oil spill in the neighborhood. Amber looked out her window in disbelief, but there it was, a river of thick, black noxious crude oil gushing down the street near her driveway, forming little waves as it lapped over the sewer drain. [...Read more]

Last week, three delegates from the Gulf Coast attended BP’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) in London and spoke about ongoing impacts of company's 2010 Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The BP board responded by painting a rosy picture of the Gulf Coast ("It's an ecosystem that's used to oil," said BP chief Bob Dudley) and defending the company's use of toxic dispersant (Dudley again: "...Corexit is about the same as dish soap"). [...Read more]

If you want to get a sense of what the Keystone XL pipeline would do to Gulf Coast communities (and which communities will bear the brunt of refining 830,000 barrels of tar sands oil a day), look no further than Manchester, a neighborhood in Houston’s East End. [...Read more]

Judge Lance Africk is hearing arguments in United States District Court this week regarding a consent decree designed to correct the violent, inhumane, life-threatening conditions at the Orleans Parish Prison (OPP), a jail that an expert witness from a nonprofit criminal justice research and training firm described as the “worst jail I've ever seen.” The parties involved in the court action include [...Read more]

Crossposted from the Southwest Workers Union. On March 12, 2012 the Librotraficante caravan [from Houston, Texas] made its first stop in San Antonio with banned books in tow. [...Read more]

When I started Coastal Women for Change, it wasn't my vision to run a nonprofit. If it had been, I would have done my research and learned how to manage one. I was thrown into this work after a devastation. I was a cosmetologist before Hurricane Katrina. [...Read more]

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A delegation of Filipino groups from across the country visited Louisiana this weekend to show solidarity with a local labor struggle against the oil industry, with national and international implications. A group of former workers at Grand Isle Shipyard (GIS), all guestworkers from the Philippines, have filed a class action lawsuit against the oil company for a range of labor abuses. [...Read more]